Trust Mechanisms to Secure Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks: Current State of the Research and Open Research Issues

Abstract

Routing is one of the most important operations in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) as it deals with data delivery to base stations. Routing attacks can cripple it easily and degrade the operation of WSNs significantly. Traditional security mechanisms such as cryptography and authentication alone cannot cope with some of the routing attacks as they come from compromised nodes mostly. Recently, trust mechanism is introduced to enhance security and improve cooperation among nodes. In routing, trust mechanism avoids/includes nodes in routing operation based on the estimated trust value. Many trust-based routing protocols are proposed to secure routing, in which they consider different routing attacks. In this research work, our goal is to explore the current research state and identify open research issues by surveying proposed schemes. To achieve our goal we extensively analyze and discuss proposed schemes based on the proposed framework. Moreover, we evaluate proposed schemes based on two important factors, which are energy consumption and attack resiliency. We discuss and present open research issues in the proposed schemes and research field.